The Definitive Guide to B2B Marketing Analytics for Increasing Conversions

If you want to increase your conversion rate, it’s vital to watch your analytics closely. You will find helpful data and insights that can transform your business.

The truth is, data is an extremely important component of your B2B marketing strategy. It allows you to understand your user behavior and implement tactics that will generate more business for your brand.

Different brands have different reasons for using data from analytics. A recent study by Econsultancy revealed that 38% of companies are using data in marketing to get insight on customers’ behaviors to improve overall customer experience.

And about 26% of marketers say their top goal is to increase the ROI of marketing and sales budgets.

WHAT IS ANALYTICS?

Analytics means the analysis of data. But in marketing, analytics refers to measuring, tracking, and study of customer behavior to help you make meaningful decisions to improve your business.

Can you conduct the tracking and analysis of data manually?

It’s near impossible. Why should you do it manually when there are countless analytics tools out there? Most analytics tools out there are free. For example, Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is one of the best analytics software solutions out there—it’s tremendous. It presents you with plenty of data that might be overwhelming at first glance, such as data about your website visitors, traffic sources, among many others. But when you understand how to use it, you’ll have access to exclusive data that your business needs to thrive.

With Google Analytics software Puma boosted order rate by 7%. With millions of customers all around the world, the brand needed to understand what targeted customers are searching for at every given time—and through insights from Google Analytics, they optimized their landing pages (i.e., product pages) and saw a huge boost in sales.

B2B MARKETING METRICS

Every B2B company has a unique revenue model in place. However, they also need to consider which metrics to measure. Essentially, the metrics cut across volume, conversion, velocity, and value.

Let’s briefly discuss each one of them:

Volume metrics: These are metrics you can track early on in the marketing process simply by taking stock of them—tracking impressions, shares, website visits, clicks, email opens, downloads, sign-ups, among many others.

For most companies, the volume metrics are “vanity metrics” because they don’t directly affect revenue unless they’re further used for marketing purposes (such as following up on those who signed up on the landing page).

Conversion metrics: In your sales funnel, as prospects move from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, you want to know which percentage of cold leads become qualified leads or marketing qualified leads (MQL). And what percent of those are accepted by your sales team as a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).

This is why you need a well-planned revenue model in place. Being able to engage prospects and lead them down the funnel until they become customers is your edge. Otherwise, your business will suffer. Because you’d end up wasting both time and money to acquire new leads that will never buy from you.

Velocity metrics: This metric is concerned with timing. How long does each process take and what is the average time spent in each stage? Do you know what the total funnel time is? Are you successfully turning an MQL into an SQL? How long does it take? Be smart about this and aim to shorten the time. That’s what matters.

Value metrics: This is where the majority of B2B companies spend all their resources because it’s critical to their success.

Value metrics are expressed regarding how much you earn either in dollars, Euros, etc. Metrics that affect revenue generation are categorized and deemed more valuable than the other metrics. ROI, CPL (cost per lead), and so on, are great examples.

Having looked at the core metrics to track based on the revenue model, let’s see how Google Analytics can provide helpful data for understanding each of these metrics:

1). Contact form submissions page

Your contact page is one of the most important pages on your website. Most B2B marketers can relate to this. At least, you always have one contact form on your “Contact Us“ page.

You can use Google Analytics to track the percentage of people who visit this page and interacted with your form. There is not much to do to set that up. All you have to do is to set your URL destination goal for the “Success” page.

The success page usually appears after a form has been completed and submitted successfully. So when someone submits a form, Google Analytics will count it as a goal.

Here is how to do that in Google Analytics:

Log in to your Google account. And navigate to the lower left side of the menu area.

Ensure, you’ve got your success or thank you pages created already. Now click on the ADMIN menu. You’ll be presented with this page:

Once you click the tab for Goals, you should see this: Click on the NEW GOAL button.

Now you’re presented with a pool of Goal templates you can use. Go ahead and choose the one that appeals to you. It all depends on what you want to achieve. Let’s look at the contact page for our example.

Next, you want to set the destination — your “Thank-You” page. Choose the destination option and click continue.

Add the destination page and save.

Now you’ve got everything all set up—it’s time to start recording your goals.

It all depends on what conversion means to you. It might not be a contact page. It might be a content upgrade opt-in form. A content upgrade is a way to capture email leads directly from your content. Here’s an example from Clickfunnels:

2). Email list opt-ins

While you can use your autoresponder to record your email activities, you can as well use Google analytics to have it in one place. If you ever need to use this option to track your email conversions.

You can follow the steps above. Set a goal with the destination of your “Success” page which in this case will be the Thank You page on your site that confirms the visitor has opted in.

3). Video plays

Video engagement sends a strong signal that a customer is interested in your product. It’s a worthy metric to track.

Statistics show that 64 – 85% of people who watch your product video are more likely to buy your product. It’s even more interesting when you consider that over 70% of the top 100 search results listings includes a video.

Use event tracking in your Google Analytics to track your video engagement and use the insights gained (e.g., average time spent) to improve your video quality and boost conversions.

4). Traffic sources

With Google Analytics, tracking your traffic sources is a lot easier. You can quickly log into your Google Analytics account, and navigate to “Source/Medium.”

Once you click on that menu, the page below will be loaded:

You can see the sources. You can see the source of all of your traffic. You’ll likely want to focus your energy on the traffic sources that generated results for you. You’ll find information about which sources created the most leads for you by looking in the Goal columns to the right of each listed source.

5). Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left a particular website after viewing only one page. In other words, they visited your page, and navigated away without visiting another page.

Bounce rate is also an important metric that you must watch as it tells how satisfied your customers are with your content.

If you have a high bounce rate (e.g., 74%), it’s a signal that your website visitors and customers are not happy with your content. On the other hand, a lower bounce rate (such as 30 – 50%) would mean that your website visitors are enjoying your content. Therefore, the lower the bounce rate, the better.

If you find a particular page (maybe a blog post) on your website generating a high bounce rate, you have to improve the content on that page and make it easier for people to find exactly what they’re looking for. Make your content more conversational — less like a sales letter and more like a story.

But there are situations where a high bounce rate is not a bad thing. For example, if you run a popular blog many visitors will read your blog post and leave. This will make your bounce rate look bad. So, you need to dig into your analytics and segment out such page types for separate analysis.

Now, let’s consider a few benefits of B2B marketing analytics:

Know your marketing impact on your revenue: A recent study by Harvard Business Review shows that 82% of B2B marketers named revenue as one metric that’s shared between marketing and sales. For that reason, it’s an important metric to watch.

If your marketing efforts are not converting into revenue, you’re wasting money big time. One of the interesting benefits of analytics tools is that they can be integrated into a lot of marketing tools. For example, you can integrate them into your CRM to help you watch and monitor your conversion path.

According to Aberdeen, “Average website conversion for companies with defined processes is more than twice that of companies without.”

Deep diving into your marketing data can help you gauge what makes your customers tick, and of course, it will help you make informed plans that will make your business thrive in this competitive age.

Essentially, you should be able to spot and follow up your marketing qualified leads (MQL) from the data explored and a whole lot more.

Act on your Insights:What will you do with the data and insights from your different marketing touch-points?

85% B2B marketers say they are using their organization’s data to measure their digital marketing effectiveness, and 65% also agreed that analytics has helped increase their organization’s sales revenue by more than 10%.

The value of the insights you can get from analytics is huge.

With analytics, you can collect data from different marketing channels and share with your team members. In fact, most of the analytics or CRM tools have mobile apps. That makes it easier to see your metrics anytime, and everywhere you go.

Make no mistakes about it; this could make you a data-driven B2B company if you use this data for the right purposes. And every team member will have access to data—and lead to productivity and efficiency in all areas.

Don’t just get excited about data—take action. Use the data to make decisions that will improve customer experience, and, in turn, your bottom line.

Predictive B2B Marketing Analytics

There’s a new wave around the use of predictive B2B marketing analytics to boost sales. It has been mentioned as the future of B2B marketing by a lot of marketers.

In fact, market leader Gartner predicted that services that facilitate B2B predictive analytics would experience significant double-digit growth over the next few years.

Let’s take a careful look at predictive B2B marketing analytics and how it can help you boost your sale conversion rate.

Why should you care about predictive analytics?

“Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data,” according to SAS.

Predictive marketing analytics allows businesses to predict leads or know beforehand which customer is most likely to convert or will have the most significant revenue impact.

This is so important to B2B marketers who spend a lot on advertising as it will help them maximize their ad spend and create more targeted and personalized content that connects with their target audience.

Predictive marketing can help you understand your ideal customers better—so that you can properly integrate insights into all stages of the customer’s buying cycle —allows B2B businesses to see a high ROI.

According to Forrester, “Demand for predictive marketing analytics is growing because B2B marketers see early implementations delivering increased program efficiency and returns on marketing investments.”

Most interestingly, B2B marketers are so excited that predictive marketing can also be integrated into their CRM and other marketing tools.

Predictive marketing is the future of marketing indeed. In fact, Forbes calls it “The next frontier of B2B sales.”

ACCESSING B2B MARKETING ANALYTICS TO SEE THE LEADING INDICATORS OF REVENUE

The big part of B2B analytics is at the point of interaction with customers. It’s not only used for marketing performance measurement—but also used as the raw material for predictive marketing, as well as the leading indicator for revenue generation.

You can use high-end tools to integrate these events and track each of them immediately. Whether you’re hosting a webinar, spending more on paid advertising, or sponsoring a huge event, you can monitor the resulting engagement in your touch point channel.

The outcome will give you insights on the source of revenue in all your marketing efforts.

More importantly, it’s critical that brands put analytics at the heart of their business’ goal. Most times, some B2B marketing teams decide to outsource their marketing analytics task instead of taking the pain to do it by themselves.

Of course, they could still get useful data, but they end up not trusting the data and become reluctant to execute plans they developed based on the data.

So what’s your solution?

Ensure your marketing team works side-by-side with your data scientist, digital analyst, and marketing researchers to formulate a hypothesis, look at the math, and question assumptions.

And again, a marketing team should have someone who deeply understands analytics and can interpret their meaning. Set up brainstorming sessions within your marketing department to allow analysts to understand your business goals.

CONCLUSION

Marketing analytics gives you the insights you need to enhance your business operations. But you must be willing to measure campaign performance across different channels. There are no shortcuts.

To achieve better results, make sure you integrate marketing analytics with your sales funnel process and align your content to suit customers while they are still considering your product and help sales close more business.